Treatment of diseases, such as cancer, and cells using radiation therapy, radiotherapy, radiosurgery, or radiation oncology has improved over the last few decades. Doctors can treat problem areas in patients, or any living organism, using proton, heavy ion, charged ion, photon, x-ray, or gamma ray radiation therapy with relative precision and accuracy. In some cases, radiation therapy is preferred over chemotherapy or surgery as a non-invasive lower risk treatment. Even with advances in medicine, radiation treatments still present high risks to patients by potentially damaging healthy cells or not killing enough diseased cells.
Healthy cells may be damaged during radiation therapy due to uncertainty relating to beam widths, beam scattering, the true internal position of the target, real time internal movement, patient movement, patient breathing, limits of medical imaging technologies, human error, or machine targeting uncertainty. This may result in overtreating or undertreating a target area. Moreover, the treatment costs for radiation therapy can accumulate due to the number of sessions, equipment expenses, repeated medical imaging tests, or labor costs.
The use of micro-medical devices, either implantable or provided externally, is a quick growing field in medicine. With continued miniaturization and advances in nanotechnology, some medical systems now have the added advantage of having tools or machines work in vivo providing practitioners with another dimension of treatment.
It is desirable to reduce damage or exposure to healthy cells from an external radiation source while effectively treating more cells in a target area of a living organism.